


The Last Sea

by draculard



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Dissociation, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Numbness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, War Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 05:44:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20541068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Arthur has a sneaking suspicion that after the war, Tommy doesn't feel anything at all.





	The Last Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Wilfred Owen's war poem "Insensibility":
> 
> By choice they made themselves immune  
To pity and whatever moans in man  
Before the last sea

There’s nothing she can do, really, but pretend she doesn’t hear. When Tommy was a boy, he never had nightmares. None of the Shelby brothers were nervous boys; they were quick to anger, quick to act — not cautious, not prone to fear. Back then, there was no reason for anyone to learn their names; they were as exchangeable as three broken knuckles on the same closed hand. 

Now, of course, things are different. Tommy is quiet now. He’s as used to giving orders as he is to things going wrong. That calm control of his is all that keeps him separate from Arthur. 

During the night, of course, it slips away. From the parlour, Polly can hear him — the rap of his knuckles against the wall as he twitches in his sleep; the almost inaudible twisting of the sheets; the harsh, brash gasps as he comes awake just a moment before slipping away. 

She comes into his room sometimes and watches from the door until he wakes, her face impassive. When his eyes snap open, they are always dry — burst veins inside the whites, dark bags beneath them, and pale, cold insensibility staring back at her, unaffected by the dream. He can sweat through his sheets and he can fight for a single deep breath, but those eyes give him away. 

They’re always cold.

* * *

Arthur’s seen plenty of it, in slightly different flavors. He knows men who were discharged or even executed for their cowardice. He knows men — saw them in field hospitals — who were rendered helpless by the shells. It was like they had no mind at all; they were infants waiting to be cared for in their cots, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, saying nothing.

It’s the ‘seeing nothing’ bit that he’s most familiar with. He encountered that plenty of times down in the trenches. There were men there who would keep smiling as they stepped over bodies in the mud. They’d stopped seeing on purpose and they certainly weren’t interested in starting up again.

Arthur, he tends to the other direction. He sees too much when he looks out his bedroom window into the sun. He hears too much when he walks down the street. Loud noises have a way of finding him whether he likes it or not, crawling under his skin, lifting up his scalp with itchy fingers and diving right into his brain.

He can’t pretend he doesn’t feel it — and he can’t even try to hide the waves of anger that boil over him. He has a feeling  _ nobody _ who feels what he feels could hide it.

So he has a sneaking suspicion that Tommy is awfully close to feeling nothing at all.

* * *

What Lizzie notices is that despite his frequent visits to her, Tommy doesn’t seem to care for sex much at all. She’s looked into his pale eyes while he fucks her. She’s seen the distance there. It’s like he’s somewhere else entirely — going through the motions — devoting only as much of his mind as is necessary to see this through. 

His pleasure, when it comes, is unnoticeable for the effect it has on him. Sometimes, he closes his eyes or lifts his chin a minuscule amount and Lizzie will know he’s done. But usually she knows it only by the gush of warmth between her legs, or on her breasts, or the flood of a salty taste inside her mouth. 

Perhaps it’s something he thinks he must do — some bizarre requirement nobody else seems aware of. That’s the only way Lizzie can explain why he continues to visit her. It’s not pleasure; it’s certainly not love. 

She rakes her nails over the back of his neck. When he stands later, to dress, she sees that she’s drawn blood. It runs from the angry red line on his skin and drips down his back.

And he doesn’t feel a thing.

* * *

He dreams of suffocating in the mud — the chemical-tainted smell of mustard gas — the taste of death, of rotting flesh when he grabs one of his men and hauls the corpse out of the way, skin sloughing off in his palms, getting under his nails. 

He used to bite his nails, before the war. It was something Aunt Polly harassed him about, but she could never get him to stop. He doesn’t bite them anymore. He doesn’t like the taste of human flesh and dirt caked underneath them.

What he discovers the first time he bites his nails and tastes what lurks beneath is this: it’s easiest just to blink, to accept the situation, to move on. He doesn’t feel anything when it happens. He thinks,  _ My God, what is that taste? _

And then he thinks, _ It’s Private Wells, from when I moved his body earlier today. _

And then, without emotion, he thinks,  _ I’d best stop biting my nails. _

It’s as simple as that, and from that day on it’s difficult to feel anything at all. This helps him more than anyone can know. When a tunnel caves in and you feel no panic, it’s effortless to move out of the way, to pull the nearest men out from under the falling rocks, to drag unconscious soldiers from the rubble when it’s done. And he must be doing something right, for they simply won’t stop giving him awards.

Even at night after the war, when he wakes in a cold sweat, chest heaving, he finds himself remarkably calm. He sees Aunt Polly standing in his doorway — or Arthur sitting like a shadow by his bed, grasping Tommy’s hand too tightly in his own — and all he feels is quiet curiosity:  _ What lured them here? What are they thinking? Why do they sit so still? _

_ What will they say? _

And the answer is always the same: Nothing. Arthur will avert his eyes when Tommy looks his way. Aunt Polly will leave when she sees he’s awake.

And Tommy will wipe his brow and wonder at his beating heart, at the images still swirling in the dark: mud and bright human innards spilled over the ground, men buried in the earth, dark tunnels filled with gas. 

Physically, every symptom points to distress — yet Tommy’s mind is placid, undisturbed. The images seem like he’s viewing them through a swirling fog; distant, implacable, unrefined. 

“Insensible,” he whispers to himself, and covers his eyes when he hears his own voice. “Insensible.”


End file.
